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Journal Article Objectives. Because of their youth, adolescent parents often lack the interpersonal skills necessary to manage the relationship challenges involved in parenting, leaving them and their children vulnerable to the health risks associated with relational stress and conflict. The primary goal of this study was to test the efficacy of the Young Parenthood Program (YPP), a 10-week counseling program administered during pregnancy and designed to facilitate interpersonal skill development and positive parenting among adolescent parents. Methods. Participants included 105 pregnant adolescents and…
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Journal Article Prior research has noted that although cooperative coparenting between resident and nonresident parents is beneficial to children, this form of shared parenting is relatively uncommon. Relying on nationally representative data from two waves of the National Survey of Families and Households(N=628), this study examines the importance of nonresident fathers' and resident mothers' new marriages and new children for levels of cooperative coparenting and test whether changes in coparenting are linked to changes in parents' marital or fertility statuses. Consistent with prior studies, the data…
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Journal Article Using latent profile analysis, the authors examined patterns of mother - father involvement in adolescents' peer relationships along three dimensions-support, guidance, and restrictions-in 240 Mexican-origin families. Three profiles were identified: (a) High Mother Involvement (mothers higher than fathers on all three dimensions), (b) High Support/Congruent (mothers and fathers reported the highest levels of peer support and similar levels of guidance and restrictions), and (c) Differentiated (more guidance and restrictions by fathers than by mothers, similar levels of parent support). These…
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Journal Article That separation and divorce frequently burden the young child emotionally and developmentally has moved from scientific to common knowledge over the past two decades. Recent cultural changes also moderate or intensify such stress and strain on the parent-child relationship: a divorce rate hovering at about 40% of all marriages, a third of all births occurring outside of marriage, and a steady increase in the involvement of fathers in the lives of their young children. This discussion focuses on the clinical implications of such changes for the vital relationships that comprise the nurturing…
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Journal Article Research suggests that high parental support and control improves children's well-being. However, a large part of these studies have focused on the parenting of married parents. Research on parenting after a divorce, mainly has focused on parenting of divorced mothers, with few exceptions concentrating primarily on non-residential fathers. Therefore, we compared both parenting dimensions support and control of fathers in different family structures (non-residential fathers, fathers in joint custody and married fathers). We also investigated the association between fathers' parenting…
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Journal Article With a large and growing share of American families now forming outside of marriage, triangular infant-mother-father relationship systems in "fragile families" have begun to attract the interest of family scholars and clinicians. A relatively novel conceptualization has concerned the feasibility of intervening to support the development of a sustained and positive coparenting alliance between mothers and fathers who have not made an enduring relationship commitment to one another. At this point in time, there are very few published outcome studies of programs explicitly conceived to help…
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Journal Article Drawing from an ethnographically-informed study of men's identities and social relations in prison, this article explores the ways in which ideas about fatherhood are institutionally deployed and personally experienced. Based on interviews and observational data in a young offender institution ( YOI) for 18- to 21-year-old men, the article considers young men's orientations toward being a father and their participation in parenting classes and a ' Fathers Inside' group. Four vignettes are constructed to present an account of some of the issues surrounding men's experience of prison, being a…
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Journal Article To better meet the needs of eligible African American men who were reluctant to enroll in a 5-year study called the Program for Strong African American Marriages (ProSAAM), we employed two focus groups to listen to the voices of a sample of the population being recruited and to explore their feedback about taking part in such a marriage enrichment program and how best to recruit other African American men. We explain our application of the focus group results to our recruitment of African American married couples for ProSAAM. The positive outcomes from the implementation of these results…
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Journal Article This paper uses national longitudinal data and several new empirical strategies to examine the consequences of teenage fatherhood. The key contribution is to compare economic outcomes of young fathers to young men whose partners experienced a miscarriage rather than a live birth. The results suggest that teenage fatherhood decreases years of schooling and the likelihood of receiving a high school diploma and increases general educational development receipt. Teenage fatherhood also appears to increase early marriage and cohabitation, and has mixed short-term effects on several labor market…
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Journal Article A father's participation in a child's life has been regarded as a significant factor in the enhancement of a couple's relationship. Although the investigations between paternal behavior and marital satisfaction come with mixed results, they clearly link the concepts of maternal and paternal role expectations to paternal behavior, which can be also moderated by earner status, child's gender, and traditional versus contemporary role expectations. Research needs to focus on examining how individuals' perceptions of role expectations relate to fathers' actual parenting behavior. Therefore, a…
